5ingles

The Body
"Fails"

Maroon 5

Related Content

• Maroon 5
  February 27, 2013
• Testament
  February 20, 2013
• The Voice's Prince medley should include the following songs
  February 1, 2012
• Nine unheralded work songs for Labor Day
  September 3, 2012
• Metallica at Outside Lands: The five best parts of the band's fiery San Francisco show
  August 12, 2012

More About

• Lee "Scratch" Perry
• Kyle Clyde
• Gang Gang Dance
• Christina Aguilera
• Maroon 5

On bills that pair them with genuine black-metal mental patients, the Body are sure to irk purists, and you can tell they know this when their slow, laborious anti-thrash leans a bit too close to noisy, anti-music grimace.

Feel free to take the title literally, but note the relative spaciousness of Clyde's array of wattle blips, static spritzes, whistles, and chain-rattles: It's ambush-free noise fare you can bring home to mom.

So you get two fatally blunted indictments for the price of one, running consecutively: GGD's hatter-mad, bat-winged original turned down a notch, with Perry's piano-sloshed, pro-police-as-lunch dub toasts shuffling alongside almost indecipherably, lending something indefinable yet valuable to the whole. Side note: Why haven't Perry and Mark E. Smith cut an LP together yet? If Lou Reed and Metallica can bro down, anything's theoretically possible.

The takeaway: If you're partying at Adam Levine's house and he tries to pass you a beer bottle you didn't open or a mixed drink you don't remember preparing, note available exits (S&M dungeon's in the east wing), smile, and say, "No, thank you."

With metaphors and folk chords mixing nicely, Dan B. and Amy Moon invite you to contemplate the state of your own union through the prism of their deceptively simple-seeming songwriting. What's being erected here: a home for two, or an emotional Berlin Wall?